It’s a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that’s what gets lost in all that Noise.

Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.

That's what I want as a reader - I want to be confident that the book will do its job.

Girls are small and polite and smiley. They wear dresses and their hair is long and it’s pulled into shapes behind their heads or on either side.

But, somehow, Wilf knows. Somehow, Wilf always knows.

Stories are important...They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.